Mosshayne Farm

Bird Scarer Update:
We have had to turn the bird scaring banger back on, as the rooks have discovered our sweetcorn.
We're really sorry for the noise and nuisance. The timing and frequency is due to the fact that the rooks are up with the dawn, and will quickly descend on the field. Our organic sweetcorn seeds are in a very vulnerable period, where rooks can still pull them up for the tasty seed, but once they have grown a bit more the rooks won't be interested.
Once the rooks all 'pitch in' on a sweetcorn field, it can be cleared in a day, which is why we have to have the noise going off frequently. They fly away, but might come back.
We apologise again, and thank you all for understanding that this can be part of living so close to the countryside.

Majority of people ‘don’t understand green terms’ 'Net zero', 'regenerative farming' and 'carbon neutral' are among a list of eco terms that are commonly not understood by the public, a new study has found.

We bought 50 farm hens a couple of weeks ago, and they're starting to lay! We're selling the eggs via our honesty shop on our public-footpath access lane at £2 a half-doz.

These are happy, free-range organic hens. They have a large house, warm and snug with straw, plenty of nest boxes and roosts, and a large grassy paddock filled with areas of longer crop for them to forage through (they love being under natural cover).

The boxes will have a mix of brown, white and the occasional green eggs from our gorgeous hens, they taste delicious!

Farmer moves border stone for tractor – and makes Belgium bigger Belgian farmer could theoretically face criminal charges for moving 200-year-old marker

It's National Gardening Week... The Soil Association have some great tips on how growing organically at home is important!

5 ways to save your soil at home | Soil Association Soil is essential to life on earth. Discover how to protect it with these 5 tips from the experts at Soil Association.

Guy's news: Swallows return to a perfect spring

A month of clear skies and easterly winds have left light frosts in our protected valleys most mornings, soon melted by a sun rising earlier and higher every day. The accompanying dry weather has allowed us to spread muck, plough, create seedbeds and plant, on schedule and in ideal conditions.

The cold nights have held back growth of early crops, but have also delayed the end of over-wintered crops, which are now hellbent on running to seed in the lengthening days. Those with livestock to graze might bemoan the lack of grass (too cold and dry), but mostly farmers are happy with two near-perfect springs in a row.

Will it be too dry for too long? Already our irrigation team is working flat out; partly to help newly planted lettuces and cabbages get their roots down, but also to germinate weeds, which will then be killed by thermal or mechanical ‘weed strikes’ before the salads growing from seed emerge. This technique, known as creating a ‘stale seedbed’, is a great way of reducing the need for hand-weeding without using artificial herbicides.

With leeks, cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, the salad in our polytunnels, and spring greens all rushing to seed – along with potatoes, carrots and onions, even in their dark, cold stores, sensing spring – we are entering the Hungry Gap: the lean few weeks on UK farms after winter crops end but before the spring harvest arrives.

Sadly, we will have to suspend our increasingly popular 100 per cent UK veg box throughout May (stopping on the 1st, back on the 31st), because there is not enough variety of homegrown veg. But thankfully, we have our farm in the Vendée region of France; the site carefully chosen because the light and rainfall bring spring crops into season a few vital weeks ahead of the UK, while being fewer road miles from our Devon farm than the Lincolnshire Fens.

The team in France are enjoying a great start to the season, despite the challenges of the post-Brexit export paperwork. Over the next few weeks, they will keep us well stocked with lettuces, cabbages, chard, summer turnips and broad beans.

We will cut our first lettuces in Devon in mid-May, followed by salad, pak choi, summer greens, then new potatoes, basil, peas, strawberries, courgettes and broad beans as we move into late June and July, and the bounty of summer. After 35 years, the prospect is still exciting.

Guy Singh-Watson

What is the Hungry Gap?

You'll notice our boxes are a sparse on UK grown veg at the moment. This is because we have entered The Hungry Gap, the hardest time of year for UK farmers: a few weeks, usually in April & May, after the winter crops have ended but before the new season’s plantings are ready to harvest.

It all comes down to the UK’s latitude. We sit right at the geographical limit for many spring crops, which would not survive our winter temperatures if grown any earlier. At the same time, as the days warm up, many hardy winter crops like kales & caulis ‘bolt’ (start to produce flowers & seeds). The result is unproductive fields & fewer British crops.

If it’s such a dire time, why hasn’t everyone noticed its impact on their plates?

Traditionally, the gap had to be bridged with a spartan diet of cabbage, old potatoes, & preserved fruits. These days, very few people eat a seasonal diet; the supermarkets can easily top up their shelves with even more imported produce, or UK crops grown under heated glass. Of course, we don’t want anyone going hungry – but unfettered airfreight & artificial heat isn’t an environmentally responsible solution. Over the years, we've worked out a pretty good system of intelligent compromises, allowing us to keep our veg boxes varied & full without sacrificing our values.

Like the supermarkets, we rely on imported produce during the Hungry Gap. We have a fantastic network of farmers in Europe who we've worked with for years. Importing isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s far less damaging than growing the same crops in the UK using artificial heat. Our imports are always brought over by land or sea, never by air. Airfreight causes 40-50 times the CO2 emissions of sea freight.

7 years ago, Riverford founder Guy bought a farm in France. Le Boutinard is in the Vendée region of France. He chose the situation very carefully: the light & rainfall there are just right for producing a bounty of spring crops that are ready a few vital weeks ahead of the UK. It’s environmentally friendly, too: Le Boutinard is the same distance from our Devon farm as the Fens. You'll notice an increasing number of our French crops in the coming weeks.

Visibility matters: Why women in farming need to be documented - Sustainable Food Trust To celebrate International Women's Day 2021, we hear from three leading female figureheads in the UK sustainable farming movement on why visibility matters

Happy International Women's Day!

Follow An Urban Harvester to see his amazing, regular efforts to show the food waste of supermarkets.

In supermarkets, customers are more likely to buy more food items if there is a bounty on the shelf (this applies especially to vegetables), and supermarkets use their margins to oversupply their shelves, encouraging the customer to overbuy (and maybe wasting food at home because of this) and then also wasting huge amounts of food which just shouldn't go to waste.

Diary of a bin diver Once stores have closed, I collect my equipment – a 90-litre backpack, a pair of gloves, two headlamps, and a smartphone – and cycle to my local supermarkets to document and harvest the daily food ‘waste’ tsunami, writes Matt Homewood.

Wales faces leek shortage ahead of St David’s Day Farmers are being forced to import leeks from as far as Turkey

Did you know? 1/3 of food produced globally is wasted. In the UK, we throw away 6.6 million tonnes of household food waste; ¾ of this is food we could have eaten. The first thing that comes to most peoples’ mind when they learn this is, ‘it’s awful when you think about how many people go hungry’, followed by ‘what a waste of money’. While these are both relevant, what is perhaps even more relevant given the current climate crisis, is that food waste is a huge contributor to global warming and climate change.

30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from food production, so we really can’t afford to waste it. A huge amount of energy, water and resources goes into producing, processing and transporting food, so when we waste it, all of that energy is wasted too. On top of this, when food waste is thrown into our general waste and ends up in landfill, it breaks down and releases methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) for the environment.

With all of this in mind, we have made it our mission to inspire Riverford customers and beyond to become true waste warriors; to reduce food waste at home, to get more out of your veg box, and be in-the-know about why food waste matters so much, now more than ever. We know so many of you are already incredibly resourceful, but for most of us, armed with the inspiration and tools, there’s more we can do.

Over the coming weeks and months, you can expect to see waste reducing recipes and Veg Hacks, handy storage and waste tips, adaptable recipes so you can use up whatever you have in and more, alongside features and lifestyle articles with a food waste focus from our magazine, Wicked Leeks.

We’re especially excited to introduce a weekly community challenge too, No Waste Wednesdays, where we’ll be asking you to get involved and share your own tips and recipes with other members of the Riverford community.

Ready to join us? There’s No Time to Waste.